Tom Sorell
Professor of Politics and Philosophy
Email:
Tel: 02476 528 031
Room: E2.10
Advice and Feedback Hours: Thursdays 3-4pm, Fridays 10-11am.
Research
Prof Sorell leads the .
Publications
Links
Profile
Tom Sorell is Professor of Politics and Philosophy and Head of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group in PAIS. He was an RCUK Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow (2013-2016). He was Tang Chun-I Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. Previously, he was John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham. Before that he was Co-Director of the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. In 1996-7 he was Fellow in Ethics at Harvard.
He has published extensively in moral and political philosophy, including four books and dozens of journal articles. His most recent published work takes up (i) internet vigilantism; (ii) deepfakes and election manipulation; (iii) the ethics of international state allies spying on one another; (iv) the ethics of state surveillance and mining by security services of large personal data sets; and (v) AI in medical diagnosis and prognosis.
He has worked on many European and RCUK funded research projects. He has also served as a consultant on security-sensitive material in UK universities and on the committee advising the AHRC on the Internet of Things.
Outside academia, he is vice-chair of the Home Office Biometrics鈥� and Forensics Ethics Group (now known as the Science and Technology Ethics Advisory Committee) and is on the data ethics committee of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner. In 2020 he was appointed Chair of the West Midlands Police General Ethics Committee. During the Covid pandemic he served on a SAGE subcommittee on policing and security. He is an Expert Fellow in the SPRITE Network Plus on Cybersecurity, a member of the NHS Safe Data Environment Network Information Governance and Ethics Working Group, and a member of the MOD AI Expert Group.
Recently Appeared
2025
Sorell, T Tom., & Kelsall, Joshua (2025)Violent Video Games, Recruitment and Extremism. Criminal Justice Ethics 1鈥�24. https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2025.2484974.
2024
Kelsall, Joshua and Sorell, Tom (2024) Social Epistemology doi:ISSN 0269-1728. (In Press)
Sorell, Tom (2024) Policing : A Journal Of Policy And Practice, 18 . paae016. doi: ISSN 1752-4512.
Sorell, Tom (2024) International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence ISSN 0885-0607. (In Press)
2023
Sorell, Tom and Li, Ricky (2023) Digital Society, 2 . 56. doi: ISSN 2731-4650.
Sorell, Tom (2023) Techn茅: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 27 (3). pp. 363-386. doi: ISSN 2691-5928.
Supervision
Hobbes; contemporary liberal political philosophy; the scope of moral theory; emergency and its theory; ethics and security: counter-terrorism; ethics of surveillance; the value of privacy; financial justice: responsibilities for and in the financial crisis; ethics of financial exclusion and microfinance; assistive technology: ethics of telecare; ethics of care robotics; cyber ethics; ethics and artificial intelligence; ethics and the internet of things, including connected vehicles; online vigilantism.
Multimedia
- Tom Sorell joins a panel to discuss digital ethics:
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Richard Marshall interviews Tom for 3:16 magazine:
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Tom Sorell talking about
- Tom Sorell talking about ''
- Tom Sorell talking about 'Digilantism'
- Tom Sorell joined a panel to discuss ''
- Tom Sorell joined the panel to discuss '
- Tom Sorell was interviewed by Emmett Cole for Robotic Business Review discussing Care Robotics.
- Tom Sorell discusses Surveillance in this podcast.
- Tom Sorell wrote an article for The Conversation explaining how
- Tom Sorell about policing paedophiles in the UK (video in French)
- Tom Sorell speaking to the forum on care robotics.